Friday Feeling - How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days
Friday, September 5th, 2008
How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days is a frothy, sometimes enjoyable, sometimes plain moronic romantic comedy which relies on the witty charm of its two leads Kate Hudson and Matthew McConnaughey. Good looking, intelligent and deceptive, both have a hidden agenda as they start dating each other.
Hudson plays the implausibly named Andie Anderson, a columnist for air-headed women’s mag Composure. Sick of writing about handbags and facials, Andie is looking for her big break into political journalism, but will only have the chance if she nails an article on the classic dating mistakes that women make. She has been given 10 days to date a guy and then ‘lose’ him by committing every relationship faux-pas in the book, reporting her findings to her desperate readers.
Then, at a party, she meets advertising exec Ben Barry whose boss has promised him a diamond account if he can make a woman fall in love with him in – you guessed it – 10 days. Of course neither knows about the other person’s wager. Andie creates scenarios that no man could stomach – like naming Ben’s penis Princess Sophia or allowing her dog to pee on his pool table – whilst Ben tries to grin and bear it and simultaneously win the dappy reporter’s heart.
I find these bet plots really annoying. Any intelligent woman who found herself in Andie’s shoes would surely have a quiet word with the man who was supposed to dump her, maybe offering him half her first month’s wages to go through with it. But these sorts of tactics never occur to our two hopefuls, and so we have to go through all their awkwardness and guilt with them until their ulterior motives inevitably come to the fore.
How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days will be showing on FilmFour at 9pm, Saturday 6th September.
